Tag: Tutorial

Nick Kwiatkowski created a few very interesting posts with video tutorials, he writes; The second I heard about Adobe giving us the ability to create our own extensions to the Flash Platform in AIR 3.0, I was smitten. It was finally a way that we could add our own features and do the things that were high priorities on our lists, but not on Adobe’s. I knew I was looking for features that were one-offs (how many people today really need access to the COM ports), but they were forcing me to do all sorts of weird workarounds like launching proxy applications to do seemingly simple tasks.

AIR 3.0 got released a few weeks ago and I’ve jumped in head first into creating some ANEs (AIR Native Extensions). For those of you who don’t know, ANEs are packaged extensions that contain operating-system specific code (DLLs for Windows, Libraries for MacOS, Java classes for Android and Objective-C for iOS), that allow you to do things that the Flash Player wasn’t able to do.

Unfortunately, Adobe assumed that if you were developing DLLs for Windows, you were going to be using Visual Studio and nothing more. This didn’t make a whole lot of sense in my mind as they’ve been leveraging Eclipse for all of their tooling, and Eclipse does offer some great C/C++ addins. Now, that being said, Visual Studio is by far the more feature-full and hands-down the best editor for enabling these kinds of workflows on Windows. It is, however, very costly and even though Microsoft offers a free versions, it takes over your computer by installing debug versions of most of Microsoft’s shared libraries making your computer slower and more crash prone.

I wanted to use Eclipse’s CDT addin with the standard GCC tooling that is available on pretty much every operating system. By using GCC, I was able to make very portable code that with minimal effort was able to compile on all three of the major OSs (Windows, Mac, Linux). Adobe’s documentation was little help in getting this going (even if you were coding in Visual Studio, there is very little guidance on how to get things setup). I do have to note that with my setup there is one distinct disadvantage — the lack of ability to debug the DLL when it is launched from AIR. You will have to write your own C/C++ harness to do testing on your code in order to test it. If you use the Visual Studio tooling, you CAN debug any DLL while it is running (this is why Microsoft replaces the shared libraries on your system to allow that debugging).

I’ve created a four part video series documenting how to get going creating ANEs. Part 1 covers setting up your environment, including installing CDT, the compiler, and getting Eclipse setup to do your programming. Part 2 covers actually coding the C/C++ code for your Windows DLL. Part 3 covers creating your ANE, and packing up all the stuff needed to make it work. And Part 4 covers how to use your new ANE in an AIR project.

Since Flex 4.5, you have had the ability to develop and export your projects as Android, iOS and PlayBook mobile applications that behave as native ones.

You can also export your Flex mobile project as AIR desktop apps. Just open Flash builder, open your project and choose Project > Export release build. You can then export a “Signed AIR package for installation on desktop”, which means a classic .air file. Yesterday, a customer wanted to know how to run a Flex mobile application in a desktop web browser. Of course, I answered “Why would you do this ?”, and he gave me some good reasons.

His mobile application is connected to a CMS on the backend. Administrators of the application will be able to edit the content of the mobiles apps in a web application. Wouldn’t it be nice to get a live preview in the browser ? When you think of it, a Flex mobile project exports a SWF, so we should be able to run it as a web app. Of course, all the AIR APIs such as the accelerometer, or the SQLite access would be disabled, but we could have a live preview.

And it’s always a challenge for a mobile developer to demonstrate their work. Usually, they just record and publish a video of their app.

We’ll see in this tutorial how to create a Flex mobile project with Flash Builder 4.5.1, and how to publish it as a classic web application. Just follow these steps:

Jeroen Keppens wrote a very good article about using multiple databases that I defenitely found very useful;

A while ago I wrote about a custom application resource for loading multiple DBs. I received a lot of questions and decided it was time for a follow-up on how to use multiple DBs in ZF.

One of the first experiments I did with Application Resources was writing a application resource for loading multiple databases. We generally connect to multiple databases in reporting applications or in scripts where we want to aggregate data from the main database to an offsite database. Since that post I received a lot of questions on how to integrate this in the models and how to join different databases in queries using zend framework. In this post I’ll explore how to do both. Since in the meantime someone has used the idea and added a multiple db resource to the Zend Framework, I will use the “official” application resource loader instead of my own.

I completed a first version of Zend + Doctrine 1 integration today and want to share it with all you. Since currently the status on a 1.11 release is unclear I contacted all the contributors to various Doctrine-related components and combined them into a single release and wrote some documentation on all the different parts and how they relate to each other.

The code is under the New BSD License. There is a comprehensive getting started guide shipped with the Github Project.

The following parts are included in this release:

Application Resource contributed by Matt Lurz

Dynamic Form Generation contributed by Jani Hartikainen

Paginator Adapter contributed by Matt Lurz and Juozas Kaziukenas

Zend Tool Provider and modular Zend Project Style Support

Thanks to all the contributors and various other people that contributed ideas and code.

For any feedback regarding this integration, you can use the issue tracker on Github.

This release depends on Doctrine 1.2.2 to allow model code-generation from YAML files that supports Zend Framework Modular projects and their directory structure.

Most of the current glue code out there is made obsolete by generating Models that follow the Zend Framework naming conventions, into Zend Framework models/ directories. Additionally there is also support for modular applications whose model classes should follow the PEAR naming schema.

Additionally the dynamic form support allows to create simple forms that allow to create and edit Doctrine_Record instances and their relations.

This is a great help to rapidly prototype admin forms (however support for more complex forms is not yet included).

Since both projects are currently very focused on their 2.0 releases, this release aims to glue all the existing code for Doctrine 1.x and Zend Framework integration 1.x together, giving them a platform to flourish.

This little video tutorial should set you up for building your own custom Zend_Form decorators in 15 minutes. I’ll show you how you can make the necessary class and have it easily added to your existing Zend_Form_Decorator configuration.

As PHP developers, it is convenient to be able to write command line scripts in PHP. In doing so, you will almost certainly want access to Zend Framework components and their configurations as if you are writing a normal MVC app, but without invoking the MVC stack and without loading unnecessary resources. I’ve seen solutions where actions are exposed as controller actions and called by wget – these are counter-intuitive, inefficient, and will suffer from max execution timeouts and other problems.

Zend_Applicaton to the rescue

Lets start with our website’s public/index.php – the script which sets up and launches an application. It looks roughly like this:

Jon Lebensold posts another great screen cast about one of the most confusing parts of Zend Framework ever created 🙂 ;

One of the pain points for folks who are starting to work with the Zend Framework is the Decorating functionality found in the depths of Zend_Form. I’ve witnessed countless instances when a developer becomes excited by Zend_Form’s easy-to-implement form validation and creation, only to become frustrated by countless hours of fighting with Zend_Form_Decorators. This video is a humble attempt on my part to walk through how Zend_Form Decorators work and how you can reason your way through a desire result. I couldn’t have gotten my own head around this implementation of the decorator pattern without Matthew Weier O’Phinney’s excellent posts and his original devzone article.

This short video is going to be the last in my 2009-2010 series on Doctrine 1.2. I’m wrapping it up with a little example of adding timestamps, logging and using Doctrine’s event listener architecture.

Take a peak at Web Developer Juice’s writeup on how to configure and use ActiveMQ (Message Queues), defenitely worth the read.

Apache ActiveMQ is one good option for implementing message queue in your PHP application. It can be easily installed on your server and it’s web accessible admin interface really makes administrator’s life easy. It can be easily connected with PHP via STOMP. I will suggesst to use MySql for Data persistance and start ActiveMQ as unix service.

A big thank you to Ryan Horn for putting together this great screencast about Zend_Mail. Ryan took the time to talk about how to setup a dev environment that uses a gmail account. This is perfect for folks like myself who work in a development environment that’s behind an annoying ISP firewall on SMTP (port 25). Ryan Horn is a web developer based out of Buffalo, feel free to reach him by email.